Oh my bloggy audience, I do apologize for my long absence! Two weeks…Yikes! I blame New York. It seems to have sapped all my energies.
I’m back on the road. Well, the rail, really. At the moment I’m training it from Philadelphia to Baltimore. Amtrak…It conjures up lots of memories, but that’s for another post, me thinks. So, let’s talk Philly. I actually was here last Friday as well for a day trip, enroute to Washington DC, but the DC half is for another post as well…
I had high hopes for Philly. Mostly because it’s CHEAP! Oh man, a 400sq ft. artist’s studio costs $350 here. Less than a dollar per square foot is pretty common here! For those of you non-artists out there I’ll try and give some context so you can better understand how awesome that is…London, I think is somewhere between $1.50 and $2. Seattle was generally $1.25-1.50. Portland was mostly around a $1-1.25 (although apparently it’s not unusual to find somewhere at a $1 or under) and NYC seems to be about $2 and up a square foot. So, Philly was coming up on top in terms of value.
But try as I might, something about Philadelphia didn’t make my heart sing. I think in terms of the way I see cities and urban life, I’m a New Yoker and possibly a yuppie. I like coffee shops and restaurants and little local shops. That’s what I think of and expect from a neighborhood. Philly seems to think otherwise. I wandered around Northern Liberties (“for Hipsters with jobs”), Fishtown and South Philly (“for Hipsters without jobs”) and…Northern Philly seems really spread out and even on their sort of main streets the businesses are few and far between and just sort of lack…lustre! I finally found Fairmount. It had a nice High Street and the old Penitentiary which looks like a castle and is now open for tourism. Does one neighborhood make a city?
I don’t know. Fairmount renewed my faith in Philly. A bit. Is frugalness a good reason to pick a city? Definitely something to mull over while in Baltimore.
